Man as a Machine

My conclusions from the above observations are:

1. The fiercer animals are, the less brain they have

2. The brain increases in size in proportion to the gentleness of the animal

3. Nature has one condition that the more one gains in intelligence the more one loses in instinct

Does this bring gain or loss?

I do not mean that brain size indicates the tameness in animals.

The quality must correspond to the quantity, and the solids and liquids must be in that due equilibrium which constitutes health.

The imbecile and the insane have a brain.

But their brains are deficient in consistency.

They are too soft.

But if the causes of imbecility, insanity, etc. are not obvious, where shall we look for the causes of the diversity of all minds?*

They would escape the eyes of a lynx and of an argus.

A mere nothing, a tiny fiber, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots, and Fontenelle himself speaks of this very fact in one of his best dialogues.

Willis has noticed in addition to the softness of the brain-substance in children, puppies and birds, that the corpora striata are obliterated and discolored in all these animals, and that the striations are as imperfectly formed as in paralytics.

However cautious and reserved one may be about the consequences that can be deduced from these observations, and from many others concerning the kind of variation in the organs, nerves, etc., [one must admit that] so many different varieties cannot be the gratuitous play of nature.

They prove the necessity for a good and vigorous physical organization, since throughout the animal kingdom the soul gains force with the body and acquires keenness, as the body gains strength.

How do animals learn?

The analogy best framed leads the mind to think that the causes we have mentioned produce all the difference that is found between animals and men, although we must confess that our weak understanding, limited to the coarsest observations, cannot see the bonds that exist between cause and effect. This is a kind of harmony that philosophers will never know.

Among animals, some learn to speak and sing.

They remember tunes, and strike the notes as exactly as a musician.

Others, like the ape, show more intelligence, and yet cannot learn music.

This is caused by some defect in the organs of speech.

But is this defect so essential to the structure that it could never be remedied?

Would it be absolutely impossible to teach the ape a language? I do not think so.

I should choose a large ape in preference to any other, until by some good fortune another kind should be discovered, more like us, for nothing prevents there being such a one in regions unknown to us.

The ape resembles us so strongly that naturalists have called it wild man'' or man of the woods.’’ I should take it in the condition of the pupils of Amman, that is to say, I should not want it to be too young or too old; for apes that are brought to Europe are usually too old.

I would choose the one with the most intelligent face, and the one which, in a thousand little ways, best lived up to its look of intelligence.

Finally not considering myself worthy to be his master, I should put him in the school of that excellent teacher whom I have just named, or with another teacher equally skillful, if there is one.

Amman’s work has done wonders for those born deaf.

In their eyes he discovered ears, as he himself explained, and in how short a time! In short he taught them to hear, speak, read, and write.

I grant that a deaf person’s eyes see more clearly and are keener than if he were not deaf, for the loss of one member or sense can increase the strength or acuteness of another, but apes see and hear, they understand what they hear and see, and grasp so perfectly the signs that are made to them, that I doubt not that they would surpass the pupils of Amman in any other game or exercise.

Why then should the education of monkeys be impossible?

Why might not the monkey, by dint of great pains, at last imitate after the manner of deaf mutes, the motions necessary for pronunciation.

I do not dare decide whether the monkey’s organs of speech, however trained, would be incapable of articulation.

But, because of the great analogy between ape and man and because there is no known animal whose external and internal organs so strikingly resemble man’s, it would surprise me if speech were absolutely impossible to the ape.

Locke believed the story told by Sir William Temple about a parrot which:

• could answer rationally
• had learned to converse as we do.

People have ridiculed Locke.

But suppose some one should have announced that reproduction sometimes take place without eggs or a female, would he have found many partisans?

Yet M. Trembley has found cases where reproduction takes place without copulation and by fission. Would not Amman too have passed for mad if he had boasted that he could instruct scholars like his in so short a time, before he had happily accomplished the feat?

His successes, have, however, astonished the world; and he, like the author of The History of the Polyps, has risen to immortality at one bound.

Whoever owes the miracles that he works to his own genius surpasses, in my opinion, the man who owes his to chance.

He who has discovered the art of adorning the most beautiful of kingdoms [of nature], and of giving it perfections that it did not have, should be ranked above an idle creator of frivolous systems, or a painstaking author of sterile discoveries.

Amman’s discoveries are certainly of a much greater value; he has freed men from the instinct to which they seemed to be condemned, and has given them ideas, intelligence, or in a word, a soul which they would never have had. What greater power than this!

Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art.

Could not the device which opens the Eustachian canal of the deaf, open that of apes?

Might not a happy desire to imitate the master’s pronunciation, liberate the organs of speech in animals that imitate so many other signs with such skill and intelligence?

Not only do I defy any one to name any really conclusive experiment which proves my view impossible and absurd; but such is the likeness of the structure and functions of the ape to ours that I have very little doubt that if this animal were properly trained he might at last be taught to pronounce, and consequently to know, a language. Then he would no longer be a wild man, nor a defective man, but he would be a perfect man, a little gentleman, with as much matter or muscle as we have, for thinking and profiting by his education.

The transition from animals to man is not violent, as true philosophers will admit. What was man before the invention of words and the knowledge of language?

An animal of his own species with much less instinct than the others.

In those days, he did not consider himself king over the other animals, nor was he distinguished from the ape, and from the rest, except as the ape itself differs from the other animals, i.e., by a more intelligent face.

Reduced to the bare intuitive knowledge of the Leibnizians he saw only shapes and colors, without being able to distinguish between them: the same, old as young, child at all ages, he lisped out his sensations and his needs, as a god that is hungry or tired of sleeping, asks for something to eat, or for a walk.

Words, languages, laws, sciences, and the fine arts have come, and by them finally the rough diamond of our mind has been polished.

Man has been trained in the same way as animals.

He has become an author, as they have become beasts of burden. A geometrician has learned to perform the most difficult demonstrations and calculations, as a monkey has learned to take his little hat off and on, and to mount his tame dog.

All has been accomplished through signs, every species has learned what it could understand, and in this way men have acquired symbolic knowledge, still so called by our German philosophers.

Nothing, as any one can see, is so simple as the mechanism of our education. Everything may be reduced to sounds or words that pass from the mouth of one through the ears of another into his brain. At the same moment, he perceives through his eyes the shape of the bodies of which these words are the arbitrary signs.

But who was the first to speak? Who was the first teacher of the human race? Who invented the means of utilizing the plasticity of our organism? I cannot answer: the names of these first splendid geniuses have been lost in the night of time. But art is the child of nature, so nature must have long preceded it.

The men who were the most highly organized, those on whom nature has lavished her richest gifts, taught the others.

They could not have heard a new sound for instance, nor experienced new sensations, nor been struck by all the varied and beautiful objects that compose the ravishing spectacle of nature without finding themselves in the state of mind of the deaf man of Chartres, whose experience was first related by the great Fontenelle, when, at forty years, he heard for the first time, the astonishing sound of bells.

Would it be absurd to conclude from this that the first mortals tried after the manner of this deaf man, or like animals and like mutes (another kind of animals), to express their new feeling by motions depending on the nature of their imagination, and therefore afterwards by spontaneous sounds, distinctive of each animal, as the natural expression of their surprise, their joy, their ecstasies and their needs? For doubtless those whom nature endowed with finer feeling had also greater facility in expression.

That is the way in which, I think, men have used their feeling and their instinct to gain intelligence and then have employed their intelligence to gain knowledge. Those are the ways, so far as I can understand them, in which men have filled the brain with the ideas, for the reception of which nature made it. Nature and man have helped each other; and the smallest beginnings have, little by little, increased, until everything in the universe could be as easily described as a circle.